Posts tagged with: Jesus in popular culture

When we think about “stewardship,” our minds tend to revert to the material and the predictable. We think about money or the allocation of resources. We think about growing crops or creating goods or financial investment and generosity.

For the Christian, however, stewardship goes much further, weaving closely together the tangible and transcendent in all areas of life. “Stewardship is far more than the handling of our money,” write Lester DeKoster and Gerard Berghoef. “Stewardship is the handling of life, and time, and destiny.”

In For the Life of the World, God’s oikonomia is compared to a song, with our activity in each sphere of creation harmonizing together even as it plays in its own distinct way and through its own “modes of operation” — whether in family, business, education, or elsewhere. God has given us stewardship as a gift, granting the responsibility to manage his house and the availability to partner with the divine in that remarkable task.

C.S. Lewis points to this reality in The Magician’s Nephew, where he writes at length about the origins of Narnia and the creative call of humankind. (more…)

Over at the Patheos Evangelical Portal, I write about “How Christians Ought to ‘Occupy’ Wall Street (and All Streets).” My argument is that the occupiers that ought to be foremost in the minds of religious leaders are those who “occupy” their pews on Sunday mornings and jobs in the world throughout the week. Indeed, “Christians therefore must occupy the world in their occupations.” That’s where the renewing and reforming presence of the church in its organic expression finds its greatest work.

As I note, the “Occupy” movement has created some distress for religious leaders. The perennial question reverberates: What would Jesus do? For some, it’s clear: there must be an institutional embrace of the Occupy movement by seminaries and churches.

But the implications of my call to recognize that Christians already occupy “all streets” is that Christians must learn to, as Jonathan Chaplin puts it, embrace institutions, and not just those that are “sacred,” like churches and seminaries. As Chaplin writes, “Christians need to reckon with the fact that all institutions are in some sense faith-based, and that Christians should be unapologetic both about working to shape existing institutions from within according to their own vision of hope or, where necessary, founding their own institutions.”

So, with respect to Wall Street in particular, for instance, a recent letter published in the Times of London notes that Christians already “occupy” Wall Street in their occupations: “Many Christians today work within mainstream business, attempting to be ‘salt and light’. Others run organisations…that are committed to using business and finance to bring social benefits, raise living standards and create jobs.”

Contrast all this with Makoto Fujimura’s advice to the Occupy movement to resist positive embrace of institutions: “The moment we institutionalize, the local movement dies a slow death as it consumes the very resources we are trying to release.” On this view institutions and systems are by definition exploitative and dehumanizing. To this type of view Chaplin responds that while there is much that is true in such a diagnosis, the proper response is not to flee institutions but to work to reform them, and where necessary recreate them. Chaplin speaks of

institutions that, even in limited ways, can embody the central norm of love, a norm which in turn needs to be fleshed out in more specific directives about justice, solidarity, peace, stewardship, and so on. Our challenge is to work toward developing institutions that can serve as conduits of this kind of love, with all its differentiated concrete applications on the ground. Such institutions we should indeed learn to love.

The payoff here is that one of the ways the church fails its members (and its business people in the case of Wall Street), is that it does not usually provide them with the worldview, the tools, and the sense of responsibility for living out their Christian faith in a responsible way in their occupations. Thus, says John C. Knapp, “Many Christians struggling to make their faith relevant to their daily work find the church oddly indifferent to their lives on the job.”

Part of the answer is to get these institutions (churches, seminaries, businesses) and their representatives to start talking to one another again. And that’s something that the Acton Institute has been doing for more than two decades. One of the best starting points for this conversation that I know of is Lester DeKoster’s little book, Work: The Meaning of Your Life—A Christian Perspective.